AI‑Assisted Frontend: Safely Refactoring React Components with Code Agents

From Prompt to Production: Documenting the AI Builder’s Journey. Handing an AI code agent unrestricted access to your React repository usually ends in one of two ways: a beautifully refactored application, or a subtle hallucination that silently breaks your production routing. Code agents like Aider, Cursor, or Claude Code are incredibly powerful for untangling legacy spaghetti code. But because they lack visual context—they can't "see" the browser rendering—they will often rip out crucial CSS classes, misplace DOM nodes, or accidentally drop edge-case conditional renders. The only way to safely use AI to refactor frontend code is by treating your test suite as a concrete wall. Here is the practical workflow for using a CLI agent to refactor React components, utilizing automated tests to keep the LLM strictly on the rails. The Scenario: The Bloated Dashboard Component Imagine you are working on an internal SaaS dashboard. You have a UserDashboard.tsx file that has grown to 800 lines. I